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It was announced this week that bestselling author Michael Lewis’ new book about Wall Street, Flash Boys, is set to be released by W.W. Norton & Company on March 31st, 2014. No details about the thesis of the book are available at the moment. Nonetheless, it is a fine time to revisit the “Michael Lewis Sign.”

In 1989, Michael Lewis wrote a book about the rise of Wall Street in Liar’s Poker. What ensued was the recession of 1990-1991. In 1999, he wrote The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, a book about the rise of the Internet, and the technology bubble burst one year later. In 2010, he wrote The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine after a historic collapse of the stock market. The S&P 500 has gone up 71% since the day the book was published.

It should be noted that Lewis also wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game in 2003 about Billy Beane’s sabermetric method of assembling a winning roster. In the six years leading up to publication of the book, the Oakland A’s had increased their win total every year. After the book was published, their win total decreased five of the next six years.

To call these correlations the “Michael Lewis Sign” is not to suggest that he is causing these historic trend reversals that inevitably seem to accompany the publication of his best sellers. No man or woman has the power to move the market (unless, of course, you are a ghost speechwriter for the Fed Chairman). Lewis is merely a brilliant narrator –– one of the best of our generation –– of what he has observed. As such, readers can enjoy his unique gift of prose, so long as they are aware that the publication of his thesis is generally a lagging, and potentially even a contrarian, market indicator.